Brown Dwarf Hits Record Low

astroengine writes "The Keck II infrared telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, has spotted what appears to be the coldest brown dwarf ever detected. Astronomers from the University of Hawaii have managed to constrain its temperature to just shy of 100 degrees Celsius. The object is part of a brown dwarf binary system and is estimated to be 6-15 times the mass of Jupiter. This is an exciting object as it could belong to a so-far theoretical 'Y' class of brown dwarf, a classification that makes objects like this cool example more planet-like than star-like."

Comments

Re:what if there are a lot of these? a heck of a l

[maxume]

It isn't terribly likely, the a-one requirement for life is some sort of energy gradient to cheat against entropy with.

Re:So maybe they can find water on it?

[tomhudson]

I'd want those for colonizing the asteroid belt. That's where the real action is going to be if we ever decide to do anything. Don't need much energy to get out of the individual planetoid's gravity well, hollow them out for living space and raw materials, and we could even experiment with small-scale "ring-worlds".